from The Guide, February 1993 Expoloring Coprophilia People have strong feelings about shit- some of the most visceral, most immediate feelings people have. Yet shit is almost never talked about seriously. For most of us, the subject is as secret, as forbidden, as homosexuality was when we were growing up. This silence can become a burning issue for people who have or discover erotic feelings around shit. As they explore and speak about what shit means, the rest of us can't help but be fascinated. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- by Bill Andriette IT HAS ALL the elements of sexual drama- shattering taboos, a pungent assault on the senses, and plenty of cozy warm wetness. Plus it involves rectum and anus, not just organs of elimination, but- for gay men especially- gateways to pleasure. So why aren't more of us into shit play? Nausea might have something to do with it. Even the most accomplished scat aficionados- people who for whom smearing, wallowing in, and swallowing excrement makes them happy as the prover bial pig- usually report that when they first tasted shit, they threw up. "Oh, it was a challenge!" recalls David, who is 38 and lives in Boston. "The first couple of times I got into mutual shit scenes, the minute I came I went running to the bathroom and puked. During the scene it was fine, but as soon as I came, the mentality wasn't there anymore, and the whole thing just grossed me out." Even experienced scat lovers can find nausea at the borders of enjoyment. "The goal of every true shit eater is to see how much he can eat before he barfs," contends Rob, a 38-year-old Philadelphia lawyer. "From the standpoint of pure taste, shit is bitter," says Neal, another Boston scat fan. "And of course you always have that odor wafting up your nose. The quality of the experience is such that after ten or 20 seconds, there's an almost automatic gag response." Hardly glowing testimonials for shiteating- coprophagy , if you want to get technical. But there's more to it, Neal insists, for those prepared to brave this not-absolutely safe form of sexual hijinks. "Shit has another taste, which is psychological. There is an incredible connection that occurs when you are lying down on your back and there is a guy who you are very excited about standing over you, crouched down, holding his knees." Neal continues. "He's got his anus pushed into your mouth and he starts to defecate, he starts to push shit out of his hole. There is an amazing psychological joining that occurs. This place- the bowels, the sphincter, the asshole- has got a primeval, primitive connection to the most fundamental things inside a man. It's so goddamn intensely personal and sexual." As much as from stimulating genitals, erotic pleasure comes from playing games with our minds. Sex fools around with one's sense of self, identity, control, and destiny. These are all issues for which shit is a running, if submerged, theme. The polymorphously perverse infant is pleasurably attuned to the tides of its bowels, their filling and emptying, tension and release. As babies, we bawl for food and defecate with blissful irresponsibility. Then civilization imposes itself. Via the scolds and scowls of parents, the primitive joys of shit and piss are transformed into disgust. Thus, to make a long story short, are pleasure-seeking babies extruded into anxious, responsible, career-minded adults. For most people, shit emerges from behind closed bathroom doors only in sickness or at the end of life. The shit of bedpans and Depends greases the passage from adulthood back into infantlike dependency, and finally, out of society entirely. We complete fleshly existence as the excrement of worms and microbes. As much as it is the end-product of the plants and animals we eat, shit is a symbol of demise. With its starring role in the drama of the self's origins and ends, it's no wonder that shit is as suf fused with erotic potential as it is smelly, and that scat lovers wax poetic and mystical about excremenL David recalls he first ate shit as an initiate into a secret neighborhood club of fellow 12 -year-old boys, the class of humans drunkest on ritual and magic. "Sharing shit is one of the most secret acts men have," relates Rob. "I've known guys who have actually thought of it as a sacra ment." Shit play takes on religious overtones in part because, like getting nailed to a crucifix or fasting on a pillar in the dessert, it's an extreme and testing experience. Putting shit in one's mouth is an attempt to resolve a paradox: how could something so intimately connected with the body and with food be so disgusting? It's a question as viscerally and intellectually compelling as that of God's existence in a world where millions perish agonizingly in gas chambers and AIDS wards. To believe in God or eat shit requires a courageous, and potentially unjustified, leap of faith. But only the latter can lay you low with a case of hepatitis. As with faith, people approach shit play in steps. Cory, a 25-year-old gay man, says that starting when he was about 15, he used to fantasize about falling into the hands of a gang of straight toughs. "In my mind I would have them take control over me," he tells The Guide. "They would make me blow them, fuck me, completely dominate me, and then use me as a toilet." When he was 17, Cory began to play with his own turds. "I would go into the bathroom, shit on top of the toilet seat or in a dish, and then while masturbating, I would lick it and smell it," he says. 'The orgasm was so intense." But afterwards came guilt. "I didn't know if it was right or if I should be doing anything like that. I still feel that way. I don't know why." Cory said that he had never talked with anyone about his interest in shit until he responded to The Guide's query for people interested in coprophilia He has engaged in shit play with only one other man. They connected over the phone lines, ostensibly just for vanilla sex. "We were sixty-nining and I was licking his ass. He said, 'What do you want me to do?' and I said, 'I want you to shit on me.' The minute I saw it start to come out I just put my mouth on it and I let him go right in my mouth." Cory's fantasy had come true. "It was really thrilling having this guy let me eat his shit," he recalls. "I felt like it was a privilege to do it for him. And I actually chewed it and swallowed." Nonetheless, Cory says he remains deep in the closet about his shit interests. His lover doesn't have a clue, Cory says, and he has no plans to tell. For Mike, who is 23 and lives in Shreveport, Louisiana, shit happened only gradually. The main theme of the sex he and his older lover have is dominance and submission, and scat developed out of their regular SM play, with Mike taking the bottom. "I would lay in the tub and he'd piss on me", Mike says. "Then later it got to where he'd shit on me. He'd piss on me first, and then he'd turn around, and I'd be eating his ass and then he'd do it." But it was "just the other day," Mike says, that he crossed the Rubicon and actually ate his lover's shit. "You fantasize about it, and it sounds great until you actually do it," Mike reports. The gagging was intense, he says. "To me the taste was bitter, and the overall feel of it in your mouth is real thick; it's like, yechh!" Timing was part of the problem. "When he finally did it, I was too close to coming," Mike suggests, "otherwise it wouldn't have been such an automatically gross thing." But gagging aside, Mike says he is fascinated about trying to eat shit again, next time when he isn't so close to orgasm. But Mike adds that his lover feels ambivalent about shit play, and isn't sure he wants to do it. WITH MORE than a few bowel movements to have passed his lips, David's puking days are behind him. The 38-year-old Bostonian is a player in the small but accomplished fraternity of scat. David says shit play is his main erotic interest and activity, one that he shares with his lover, who he met on the shit circuit. With the help of Jack's Number Two , a Houston-based magazine that is the Baedecker of gay scatology, David says he has no trouble finding scat buddies. "There are about 15 people in the Boston area who are listed, and I know most of them," David says. "From the list I've gotten together shit parties, with about a dozen people. That's when my living room gets wall-to-wall plasticized, we put on a couple of scat films, and just have a good time." David has assembled a motley crew of scat friends. One guy he knows bakes aged turds into choco late chip cookies and makes his partners eat them. Not just any old shit will do: it has to be excre ment carefully aged in a jar kept in warm place, on the radiator or a sunny windowsill. "There's one time he came over the apartment," David recalls, "and I said, 'Well, I don't have any aged shit so let me zap it.' So I put some in the microwave, and it stunk up the whole building." Another of David's pals is into infantilism, and likes to don diapers and assume the identity of a toddler. But he has a rep for not being able to dump on demand, the scatological equivalent of chronic limp dick. "I knew he was coming over so I didn't flush the toilet that morning," David recounts. "When he arrived, I just went in and grabbed a handful and put it down his diapers and slapped him around with it. That's how he got his rocks off." The infantilist and scat scenes are overlapping but distinct. Neal says he enjoys having a few beers at a bar ("It has to be a cool bar") and just letting go. "I find it really-exciting to be in a public place and piss or shit in my jeans," he says, "maybe because I'm breaking away from that control society places on kids when they are toilet trained." But throughout the experience, Neal says, his self -conception remains resolutely that of a grown man. Submission and domination is also a regular theme of shit play, but "top" and "bottom" can shift places. Shitting on a partner could be a definite turn on for a top. But being made to strip, squat, and defecate could be a bottom's wet dream, also. Last spring, a scandalized media brought the scato logical exploits of Philadelphia insurance executive Ed Savitz to every American living room. Did the parochial school boys who dropped their pants to squat in Savitz's pizza boxes savor their sub mission? Or with adolescent swagger did they relish the thought of a middle-aged fag smelling and tasting their turds? Maybe both. "What can go on between two people gets too complex to be usefully described by 'top' and 'bot tom,'" says Neal. Some people into scat say that the sign of the true shit lover is that for them shit's erotic value gets disengaged from any sadomasochist or infantilist storyline, and just become a free -floating source of pleasure- shit for shit's sake. "It takes someone with a really good imagination to get into scat," says Rob, who has been in the scene for ten years. No one tells you how to eroticize shit, as Soloflex ads and Ryan Idol help us to eroticize buffed muscle-boys. In this jaded, media-drenched, era where such taboo images as naked children or a man dying of AIDS are put to work selling Benetton sweaters, shit is the rare item: richly symbolic but unspoken for. Madison Avenue won't even touch shit's negative power. You'll never see Coca Cola denigrate the competition by sponsoring billboards showing Pepsi bottles with big turds floating in them, or Nike ads that show Adidas sneaks smeared in dog doo. When it comes to putting shit's latent meanings to work and forging new ones, scat lovers have the field to them selves. ** [Image] [image] Guide's Home Page [gay travel |sex histories |news slant |features |porn reviews |feedback ] --------------------------------------------------------------------------- theguide@guidemag.com Copyright © 1995 The Guide Created: December 7, 1995 Modified: December 7, 1995